Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: moki on August 23, 2011, 10:30:41 am

-tale of bloodshed-

...so what shall I do?

Wall up the entrance. Your fort is under royal quarantine and therefore it's banned to contact outside world until you cleanse the dorfs

I don't really need traders, so this doesn't make it any harder... I'll think I'll try it for roleplaying
The fort is mostly above ground. A walled circle of 81 tiles diameter filled with water and all the buildings in there. It's got a main tower with 112 bedrooms (for the 65 remaining dwarves), a royal dining room and a statue garden on the roof. There's also a separate building for food and drink stockpiles, a butchery/tannery (specialised on kittens and puppies) and the mayor's house. Everything else isn't finished yet.
From all I can see so far, the infection doesn't spread as it's no blood or secretion... everybody who died so far got in direct contact with the dust clouds, got immediately paralysed and suffocated within a day or two. I'll just close off the main area of the fight for now, quarantine a few dwarves that are definitely healthy (I even got a few rooms that were prepared as survival vault) and build a wall around the fort's entrance. Nobody is getting inside until there have been no tantrum or disease related deaths for at least a year. After that period, I may consider reopening the infection area and see if it's still dangerous.

[edit]
One short contact with the outside world was allowed. Specifically, one very short and gory contact with a goblin siege which arrived a week after the great dying. I sent my recruits out there to be slaughtered but they did remarkably well, sustaining only minor injuries while beating trolls into a bloody pulp. These guy's will be the elite squad of my new military.
...and the syndromes obviously don't spread as soon as all the primary infected are dead. I had hoped to finally loose a fort in an epic way (so far it was mostly boredom or FPS death), but it seems, Armok is with my dwarves. Still, the quarantine stays up for at least one year to be sure.

[edit2]
Tantrums all around! Yay! A woodcrafter just punched a farmer in the face whose husband promptly destroyed a door to the water reservoir which flooded part of the workshop rooms.
There's still hope for death by complete chaos...   

Alot of copper is the only proper thing to build

Or just make full body copper armor and hammers for every dwarf in the fortress. It's not very strong material, but... just imagine 100 or more dwarves, all clad in masterwork armor, rushing at the enemy. You could also search for (or import) some tin to make bronze, which is a pretty good material.

I once had an engraver who really hated the mayor. Now the mayor (who detests cockroaches) has got a room with dozens of engravings of cockroaches and other vermin and himself being surrounded by them. I don't know it it's just random or if the game actually checks for relationships and room ownership when doing the engravings... anyway, that engraver's one of my favourite dwarves.

There are also lots of engravings of engravers engraving images of engraving engravers, engraving... well, you get what I mean. "Urist McApprentice, please hand me the 0,2mm diamond chisel, this shit's going fractal."

Nope, not possible. You could only mod in that you're dwarves don't need to eat and drink until she's free again.
Maybe using cages instead of chains would've helped. Dwarves in cages rely on other dwarves feeding them, but if one of those useless soapmakers decides to actually bring them food, they will eat. At least that's what I observed.


Oh, and the baby would've died anyway if it was without it's mother for more than a few days, making the mother very unhappy and possibly leading to tantrums. That's probably realistic, though...

For me it's temperature=off, unless I plan on magmaing someone. Temperature is nice, but it eats up 20 FPS at least.
The gFPS gets lowered to 15. Lower values work too, but tend to give some problems with the game's reaction time and double key presses.
I usually have the print mode set to partial:2 and it works great. I heard that it's not the best for all systems, though.
With a bit of planning, traffic designations and lots of butchery, I can get about 80 FPS on a 3x3 embark with 130 dwarves and some moving water. I find anything over 100 FPS way too fast anyway, except for the very beginning when nothing interesting happens. Did you ever watch an epic battle between 30 dwarves and 100 gobbos at that speed? It's like 5 seconds of gore but you're not able to actually see anything.

That's on a 3GHz Dual Core with 3GB of RAM and freshly optimized system.
Shutting down all unnecessary programs that run in the background, helps a little, even if DF is restricted to its own core. Normally, there's stuff like antivirus, antispyware, firewall, several chat clients (skype, ICQ, and so on), internet browser (some need to be closed with the task manager to be completely dead), Windows update processes, music player, drivers for webcam, cellphone, printers, graphic tablets and so on. Most of these are not needed for DF and can be safely disabled while playing. Defragmenting your hard drive can also help a little. It doesn't do much for DF as a game, but optimizes the overall performance of your system, giving DF more resources to work with. I was very surprised, when I removed anything unnecessary from the system (and there's quite a lot of stuff after 3 years) and did a defrag... everything went way faster and DF is a pretty good benchmark for that. One particular fort went from 45 to 50-55 FPS.

And also what Mickey Blue said... lowering the max framerate makes it work much smoother. I hate it, when my dwarves jump from one end of the map to other in one second and then slow down to a crawl in the next, because I designated some stones to be dumped. It feels faster, when the framerate is the same all the time.

I once got a human diplomat that died of old age right at the map edge... of course I got blamed and they brought lots of iron weapons the next year - pointy end first, of course. The year after that, they sent a new diplomat with a peace offering which I accepted because I wanted to finish my megaproject before going to war.

I found elves really hard to piss off during the game, but somehow managed to gen a few worlds with elves at war from the beginning. Their first attacks usually come at the same time as the first goblin ambushes. They're very easy to kill but also completely useless as they only bring wooden weapons and armor. Only the archers are really annoying, especially if there are 20 of them at once.

It doesn't really matter. On a flat embark, just dig down and have a corridor of traps (or build one above ground)... on a mountain, dig into the cliff and do the same. Plains are a little easier in my opinion, because you can see everything at once, but mountains so much dwarfier.
Rivers are fun, but offer no real defensive advantage. It's nice to have an unlimited water source, but for defense, a dry moat works just as well or better.

The easiest of all is a completely isolated island with water all around the embark site... but that's because nothing except fish ever enters the map. No ambushes, no invasions, no migrants. Somewhat boring after a while.

The burning everybody alive thing sounds fun. Does magma actually ignite grass? I always though you needed something flammable like a wooden log or a barrel of booze to start the fire.